Jerzy Neyman

Jerzy Neyman, born Jerzy Splawa-Neyman in 1894 at Bendery in the Russian Empire and dying in Oakland, California in 1981, was a Polish mathematician and statistician who helped create modern statistical theory. He studied at Kharkiv University under the probabilist Sergei Bernstein and took his doctorate at the University of Warsaw in 1924 under Waclaw Sierpinski, with a thesis on applying probability to agricultural experiments. He worked in Warsaw and at University College London, where he collaborated with Egon Pearson, and from 1938 at the University of California, Berkeley, where he built one of the leading centres of mathematical statistics in the world. He introduced the modern confidence interval into hypothesis testing and, with Pearson, reshaped Ronald Fisher's null hypothesis testing; their 1933 paper contained the Neyman-Pearson lemma. His 1934 paper on stratified sampling underpinned modern survey sampling, and Neyman allocation is named for him. He received the Guy Medal, the Newcomb Cleveland Prize and the National Medal of Science, and supervised 45 doctoral students.